Last week, the California State Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard in Los Angeles Superior Court following a two-year investigation into the corporation. The state agency found multiple instances of pay and hiring discrimination, as well as an extensive history of a “culture” of sexual harassment and abuse within the company.

Since then, current and former Activision-Blizzard executives, managers and employees have spoken up, either to publicly refute the claims in the suit, as Chief Compliance Officer Fran Townsend did; or to try and save face, as CEO Bobby Kotick, Blizzard President J. Allen Brack and Activision President Rob Kostich did; to come forward with their own stories of abuse and harassment at the hands of powerful and impugning men within the company as several employees did with IGN; or to simultaneously apologize and distance themselves from the allegations. Activision-Blizzard employees walked out of the office last Wednesday to protest the company, and future action – legal, labor or otherwise – is possible.

There likely will not be any resolution to this for a long time, but there should be no “return to normal” in the meantime like there was following the Ubisoft allegations or indeed even the Riot Games allegations. Over a thousand Ubisoft employees sent an open letter to the company making clear their dissatisfaction over how little things had changed within the company in the past year or so, as well as standing in solidarity with the walking-out Activision-Blizzard employees, and the fires are just starting to get stoked.

There should especially be no “return to normal” in the games press.

The media reaction to the situation as it unfolds has been odd at times (like the Kotaku article that talks about all the outlets refusing to cover Activision-Blizzard’s games, then takes the bottom paragraph to inform readers about the different games Activision-Blizzard is releasing soon). But nothing has come out that is nearly as irresponsible and downright bootlicking as a piece by Dean Takahashi at GamesBeat, VentureBeat’s gaming vertical. This piece, which we’ll refer to simply as “the Piece” from now on, starts from the perspective that Activision-Blizzard is losing a war on the battleground of public relations, and moves into territory that makes the whole situation sound like Bobby Kotick and the rest of the C-Suite at ATVI are the real victims here.

Frankly, the Piece sucks. It starts off weak and gets worse. Takahashi starts with an entire “my heart goes out” statement with a

But,

you could see from space, then immediately takes a hard left at “corporate stooge shit” or even possibly “full-bore toxic workplace apologia.”

“This is the media sideshow of the moment. A war for attention is going on now, with different parties jockeying to control the narrative,” Takahashi writes. “And I don’t think Activision Blizzard is winning the PR battle.”

We’re talking about the uncovering of a history of monstrosity here, Dean, not a “media sideshow,” but sure whatever. As he describes the lawsuit, he laments that the DFEH didn’t disclose details involving perpetrators or instances of abuse, assault, or harassment. He attributes this lack of disclosure to the DFEH’s “concern for worker privacy or its own PR savvy,” then says this puts ATVI in a “difficult position” because it couldn’t address claims it didn’t have knowledge of.

When he gets to the 2010 video of a panel at BlizzCon featuring J. Allen Brack and ousted abuser Alex Afrasiabi making fun of a woman for asking when Blizzard would stop making female characters look a certain way, he says, “The all-male panel deflected the question with near-mocking humor.” Near-mocking humor is a really odd way to describe everyone on the panel laughing raucously to a chorus of boos from the audience, and a panelist responding, “Which catalog would you like them to step out of?” But I digress.

I’m not going to beat-by-beat recap the entire article for you from here; it gets far worse as you get into it. But I did want to highlight a couple of key things:

• Takahashi frames CEO Kotick’s choice to response as coming from a man who “could no longer stay silent…” after the company’s stock price began to fall.
• He calls the company’s decision to hire WilmerHale, a union-buster recently hired by Amazon, “a good choice,” saying “Once again, while trying to do good, the company left itself open for even more criticism.”
• This bewildering paragraph:

At this point, fans, female victims, employees, and others are hammering the company. And that’s going to be difficult to defend against, as I have discovered myself that it is hard to argue with the internet. This is not my subjective assessment. Spiketrap shows that the sentiment on the Activision Blizzard matter is at 6-out-of-100, meaning it is well inside the negative range.

• Finally, he ends with a section devoted to explaining that Kotick has a reputation to maintain as “the longest-serving CEO of a major video game company,” and besides – “Activision needs to unveil the next Call of Duty game soon, but I can’t imagine that is going to get a good reception anytime soon” – so Activision should, evidently, take this seriously.
• Following criticism, he wrote an addendum that tries to justify the Piece, saying “I wrote this story as if I were speaking to Bobby Kotick, trying to convince him why he should care about it,” “to tell them they must take it seriously, as it represents so many different kinds of threats on matters such as recruiting, the stock price (which if you’re an employee you care about), and the ability to sell games,” that “This is an appeal to reason and the mind.”
• Sure, Jan.

First of all, I don’t know why you need to write anything to Bobby Kotick, because as they say on this internet you have such a hard time arguing with, he’s not going to fuck you, sweatie. ATVI has been taking all sorts of actions to make sure it comes out on top of this thing just fine, and it doesn’t need a business writer – 30 years in the field or no – to tell them how to manage their PR, like what the fuck are you doing? Kotick has intentionally surrounded himself with a fucking DC Comics rogue’s gallery of awful people from both the public and private sectors, including a number of Bush Jr. and Trump officials. He gets bonuses in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year for simply fucking existing while Activision exists simultaneously, and his company purges thousands of employees on a regular fucking basis. He hired a union-buster AND he set a PTO trap for the walkout employees, probably so he could make sure their names are included in the pink slip list come February twenty-twenty-fucking-two. The man drops max donations to Mitch Fucking McConnell like he’s visiting a vending machine. He doesn’t want or need your advice, Dean.

Second of all, Takahashi has written at least one other story with a tone even remotely like this, about French developer Quantic Dream, and we know he’s at least been on the beat with regard to the Ubisoft allegations. This is dangerously close to establishing a pattern, but I don’t want to get too messy on here, so I will simply say this, speaking of unsolicited advice:

Examine the frame your reporting and analysis takes. These corporations are not your friends. They will not give you a cookie for helping them out of a bind – in any capacity. Consider the people you’re essentially planning the offensive against. Victims of sexual harassment and abuse. People who were turned down for jobs and promotions and raises for no other reason than that they were being discriminated against, who were given the work of white male coworkers to do while those coworkers fucked around playing games all day. Consider that helping ATVI save face without any kind of change – and that change should be drastic, and it should, at the very least, leave some fuckers out of a job – is akin to reinforcing the fucked up gender and racial dynamic in this industry with your own two, bare hands, regardless of how much you say you care about and feel bad for the victims. If you can’t do that, Dean, maybe it’s time for you to exit journalism. Maybe Activision-Blizzard is hiring a PR flak.

As far as the rest of the industry is concerned, we need to move well past “time to do better.”

(Anyway, it’s been a long while since I’ve showed my face here on this website I ostensibly make. Sorry about the absence. Go read Uppercut Crit’s reporting on the ATVI shit, it’s some of the best shoeleather journalism currently being done on this situation by just about anyone. Ty Galiz-Rowe has been putting in a lot of work on this, and they deserve eyeballs on it.)